Why working mothers deserve better terms

Why working mothers deserve better terms

W

orking women who enter into journalism forgo the quality time of being with their families. This affects mostly the young mothers who spend more time in the newsroom or in the field chasing news leads.

BY MUSYOKA NGUI

This week I was watching the BBC World News and saw a female news anchor reading news complete with a baby bump. Another one just got a maternity leave from her employer at a late stage of her pregnancy. Locally, another returned from maternity and announced to the world that she got a bouncing baby boy. She asked her director to play slideshows of her bundle of joy as the viewers watched.

For a profession that involves giving up the most fundamental privileges and hearkening to the costly call of duty, I salute the working women in the mass media. Journalism is not an 8-5 job. It is an emergency. It is like medicine, you can be called anytime, including from your sleep, to cover breaking news and subsequent developments.

This means that working women who enter into this profession forgo the quality time of being with their families. This affects mostly the young mothers who spend more time in the newsroom or in the field chasing news leads.

How many news outlets recognize the risks these women put themselves to just to serve the public? Do they have lactating booths for the young mothers? Do they give them insurance incentives? What about extending deserved off after a long day at work?

Curiously, some have preferred to be single mums. Single in the sense that they get a man (read a sperm donor-with genes and looks) to sire a kid and live with questions from her child asking the whereabouts of the father. Some end up lying to the child that the father died, he disappeared, he was kidnapped or those who got the guts just resign to: “Baby, if he cared he would look for us”. She then plays victim about how she was abused, how irresponsible the man was after knocking her up etc.

Consider a working mother, a journalist preferably, she wakes up at 3 am, prays, dresses, takes breakfast, goes for a long day at work and gets home from 11pm. She went out before her kids woke up, never gets to check their school homework, does not get to monitor their growth and don’t forget the maid is planning to elope with her husband and sell the suckling kid to some on-demand kidnappers who have placed high premium ransom on the kid.

Then the employer insists that she should be paid less than her male colleagues because she is a woman. She will only get a promotion if she yields to pressure from the boss to accept his sexual advances. To her, a mother’s day is every day not second Sunday of May once a year. After all, she lives every day as a mother.

The writer is a student of Bachelors of Arts Degree in Communication and Media at Chuka University. He blogs at musyokangui.blogspot.com

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